Seminar 29 // 17, 18, 19 November 2011 // London

Group introductions. The concept of ‘the curatorial’ and our vocabulary project. Irit Rogoff and Stefan Nowotny will present some of their ideas for the year’s forthcoming curriculum.

Irit would like to focus on two terms over this year ‘Public’ and ‘Community’ neither of which actually functions as the concrete materiality that has traditionally been presented. In order to rethink these we need to revisit some of the classical understandings of both and then see how we might redraft them as neither material space nor grouping of people.

Stefan would like to focus on some key concepts from Walter Benjamin, looking at how these have become essential for any theory of contemporary culture, while being grounded in a concrete political moment of the first half of the 20th century.

Irit Rogoff - ‘Public’ – we will look at a series of texts from the classical Habermas “Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere”, through Hannah Arendt, some recent texts by Michael Warner and by members of the collective Sarai in Delhi. In this first session I would like to think about ‘Public’ as neither space nor people, but open up the possibility for a state-to-come in which proximity and mutuality might exchange productively.

Stefan Nowotny – ‘Critique’ looking at the genesis and the distinction of Benjamin’s notion of ‘critique’ as it is distinguished from Frankfurt School models and in its forward looking projection to the project of post-structuralism.

- a documentation of plans and debates around the planned, but never realized journal "Krise und Kritik" in which Benjamin was engaged (taken from the Erdmut Wizisla's book "Walter Benjamin and Bertold Brecht. The Story of a Friendship"). Criticizability - Samuel Weber on Benjamin.